The Sinners and the Sea

by Rebecca Kanner

  Javan continued, “They never fix their clothes, because why spend time mending something that will tear again? A man can only mount so many whores, and then what else is there to do besides drink and fight? You see? You see, simple woman?” Suddenly she clapped her hands together and cried, “Ah!” as though she had been struck with an idea. “You could make necklaces of teeth! These are stolen so often, there is always a need for more.”

  I did not open my mouth or move my eyes to Javan’s face. I reached for the little hand in my hair and squeezed it weakly between my palms.

  “Well, if you have no more milk or goat meat . . .” Javan said.

  It was a relief when she started walking away, and a heartbreak when Herai drew her hand from mine and ran after her.

  Before they had gotten ten cubits away, Javan turned back to me. “Do not fear a mob, demon woman. Your secret is safe with me.” She touched her finger to her brow and continued away.

  CHAPTER 10

  SONS AND DEMONS

  It was clear I would never be part of a gathering of women like the ones I imagined in my father’s village. But even in the worst of places, people long for company. Especially in the worst of places. I hoped Herai might come back for milk. After a couple of moons, I grew tired of waiting and decided I would have to go into town to find her. I could not work up the courage though.

  One day it was unusually quiet. I heard no people screaming or fighting, only the occasional bleating of one of Noah’s goats. The quiet called up a loneliness so deep within me that I knew there was no son in my belly. I was empty. I felt the loss of my father as deeply as if it had only been yesterday that I’d watched him weakly slap Noah’s donkey and limp back to his tent. I must see the girl today, before my solitude drives me to madness.

  I wore a swaddling cloth under my tunic and left my sandals inside the door of our tent. The sandals were only thin straps of leather, but still I feared I could lose my feet for them in town.

  With my head scarf secured over my brow, my heart beating hard in my chest, and stones piling up in my belly, I went to find Herai. I saw no one until I had ventured at least a hundred cubits. Men and women were gathered with their backs to me around a tent. The tent hung from old wooden supports that leaned toward each other beneath its weight.

  Vultures circled above. I heard babies crying, and over their crying, a woman shouted, “We must kill them.”

  “No, only two of them.”

  “But which two?”

  “They are all spawn of the demon that split a man’s seed into three parts. Each of them must die,” said the unusually beautiful girl with a head of very long hair except for one patch that was only a few moons long.

  “A demon does not waste time with a woman once a man has left her,” Javan said.

  “Then what is it that happened to your daughter? What was it that made her slow if not a demon?”

  Javan was silent. I had not thought it was possible to silence her, and I was surprised to find that her silence did not please me. A few breaths later, she again tried to save the babies. “The girl has lain with three men, and they each planted a son in her.”

  “Then why has no one else had three at once?”

  Again Javan made no reply. I tried to think of something to defend her argument, though I was not sure I had the courage to risk the wrath of the mob. People were starting to raise their voices and shift around. I was glad when another woman cried out, “If we kill the demon’s babies, will not the demon kill us?”

  No one listened to her. Shoulders collided, and elbows stabbed at the ribs of the bodies around them. Shoving broke out. Through the gaps that appeared in the mob, I saw the girl with only one hand lying on a blanket stained with afterbirth. Babies’ cries rang out from either side of her. The arc of the mob tightened.

  I called upon Noah’s God: God of Adam, these babies need your protection.

  It would have taken two hands to hold one baby, and the girl was trying to hold on to all three with only one. They were quickly ripped away from her. Each baby was taken by a different woman, separating the mob into three parts. One part came rushing toward me.

  I felt something sharp against my head and then warmth. The warmth quickly ran down my neck. I looked down at the rock that had hit me, and then I was slammed to the ground. A foot stepped partway on my head, and another crushed my thumb and forefinger.

  I will see her burned alive echoed in my head. I did not know why I bothered to pray to Noah’s God, but I did: God of Adam, please help me from this place without allowing anyone to see my mark. I held my scarf to my brow, stood up, and started stumbling home. A few times someone knocked into me hard enough that I should have fallen, but I did not. Perhaps Noah’s God had heard my plea. Perhaps he was my God too.

  • • •

  That night Noah raged through the town. “The fury of the One True God grows. It is His place to do as He will with the lives of children. Who are you to usurp Him as ruler of all the world?”

  I had no way of knowing what had happened to the babies. Perhaps that is best, I told myself. Now that I suspected the God of Adam was as powerful as Noah said He was, I would not be able to help being angry at Him if He had let them die. I laid the side of my head that did not ache on my sleeping blanket and hoped I would not wake up for a long time.

  I dreamed that the sea fell from the sky and beat upon the earth with fists of rain. The rain piled higher, until it was as tall as a man. People screamed as huge hands made of water pulled them under. No one was spared—children, women, people who had lost a hand or foot, slow people, blind people—all of them were strangled by the sea. But I did not drown. Where am I? I wondered.

  I was awakened by babies crying. I did not know why these cries woke me when looters ran loose through the town, whooping and screaming. I heard clay pots being smashed and the crack and whoosh of wooden tent poles breaking and dropping their goatskins. Yet it was the babies who woke me.

  In the light of the full moon, I saw the figure who held the babies standing in the entryway to the tent, the door flap over her shoulder.

  “Sons for Noah,” Javan said between hard-fought gulps of air.

  In her meaty, bleeding arms were three babies. Without checking to make sure my scarf was pulled low over my brow, I ran to her and took them one by one. I laid them gently on my sleeping blanket. The first labored for breath more quietly but less successfully than Javan. He seemed to be choking on something, and his eyes were wide with panic. The eyes of the other two were still.

  I labored over them for what remained of the night, while Javan stood guard in the doorway with her sword. I took the baby who was still trying to breathe and placed him on his stomach so that he might stop choking. The back of his head was flattened and bloody. I pressed my garment to it, but the blood soaked through the fabric. Javan helped me cut a small swath of goatskin from the tent and I pressed it to the child’s head.

  When the looters no longer ran through the town, Javan joined me over the three little bodies. By dawn they were cold and their eyes shiny.

  “We have done what we could,” Javan said. Her voice was garbled, but I could still hear the anger.

  As we had labored, blood had dripped from her face onto the babies and the sleeping blanket. Now that there was nothing more we could do for the babies, I looked at her. Her face was so badly battered that she was recognizable only by the X upon her forehead and her large sagging breasts, which hung loose from what was left of her tunic. Her lips had swollen around a gash that ran the length of her face, just to one side of her newly crooked nose.

  I quickly rose and went to the other side of the tent for water to wash her wounds. She stood too. Her eye—the one that was not swollen to the size of a fist—was as blank as the babies’ eyes.

  “I am sorry,” I said. I was sorry for the babies and, I must admit, for myself, but even more for her. She had risked her life to take the babies from the other women, and she must have believed
they might live. Only someone desperately hopeful would have believed this.

  She did not wait for me to wash and bandage her face. She left the babies on my sleeping blanket and walked out of the tent. I didn’t know, as I watched her leave, that five people would die by her hand before the sun rose again.

  • • •

  Noah did not return that morning. I lay with my head upon the ground where my sleeping blanket had been, and I spoke to Noah’s God. Why did You not send these sons one at a time, so that they might live? And what was most strange to me: Why did You protect me from the mob and not them?

  “Where is your sleeping blanket?” Noah asked when he returned.

  “It is wrapped around three boys whom your God let die.” I did not address him as my lord. I thought he might strike me, but I didn’t care.

  “He will not let their deaths go unavenged.”

  “What good is that?”

  “You are a child, so your vision is small. When you cry one tear, you see the whole world through it. I have lived for hundreds of years. In those years, thousands of children have been born and thousands have died. They have been born to good and born to evil. There is more evil now than good, but God will find a way to make us righteous again. He will do it on His time and not that of an ungrateful child.”

  I did not bow my head, and I did not speak.

  “You see that ours is one of the few tents left standing,” he said.

  I remained silent.

  “Wife, you should know”—he leaned his face down so that his fury-filled eyes were level with mine—“He counts those who lack gratitude among the wicked.”

  • • •

  The goats sniffed at the ground where I’d buried the boys. Noah saw this and went to bury them deeper. When the ground was flattened again into a thick blanket of dirt, I went and knelt over them. I asked the God of Adam and all the other gods I knew of to watch over the children in death better than they had in life.

  • • •

  My anger at Noah and his God did not keep me from him that night. I had to make up for the three babies who had died right where we laid. I could not rest until I did, and neither could Noah.

  At dawn he lay panting beside me, muscles shaking from the night’s exertions. “Child,” he said when I reached for him again, “you will make a widow of yourself.” But he did not keep me from climbing on top of him once more.

  CHAPTER 11

  JAVAN’S MARCH

  It is not easy to be legendary as a murderer in a town where bloodshed is commonplace. But Javan became renowned.

  The legend begins with her lurching into the daylight, dripping blood. The three boys who came out of their mother all at the same time had just died. Javan was blind in one eye and weeping from the other. “I’ll kill you,” she yelled to no one in particular, or maybe to everyone. “But first I will tear your tongues from your mouths and your arms from your shoulders. I will bury you to your necks, pour honey on your heads, and let the ants have their fill. I will tie mice to your hair and call hawks down from the sky!”

  Javan was not so much walking as falling forward and roughly catching herself with each step. More monster than woman. The first people she came upon were our closest neighbors, a woman with a daughter and two sons. The wooden poles and stakes of their tent had been snapped in halves, thirds, and quarters, and so the family was eyeing Noah’s trees. When they saw Javan, they scattered.

  The daughter wasn’t looking where she was going—she was looking back at Javan—and she stumbled on a man who lay drunk or dead in the street, one of her feet tangling in what remained of the man’s tunic. Even as the girl fell forward, she stared back at Javan in horrified awe.

  “If I let you live,” Javan told the girl, “you will work for me.”

  Without waiting for a reply, which surely the girl couldn’t have provided anyway, Javan picked up the dead man’s sword and continued down the road.

  Next she came upon one of the few tents that had survived the night’s looting. Inside she found a man and woman. “You have taken half my sight, and I will take all of yours,” she told the man. His screams could be heard for a hundred cubits in all directions.

  The second to die was a girl who was trying to comfort the one-handed girl where she lay upon the ground, crying in the burned remains of the tent they had shared. Javan sneaked up on them, which must have been hard to do in the silence she brought with her. When the people of the town saw Javan, they became as silent as they had been for a few shocked breaths the day before, when the three boys were born at the same time.

  “It is better this way,” the girl who was about to die was telling the one-handed girl. “The demons that lived within your womb are gone, and there is nothing for anyone to remember them by.”

  “Is this why you helped tear them from her arms?” Javan asked as she stepped into view.

  The girl spoke swiftly, because she knew how quickly Javan could kill her. Also how slowly. “I was afraid they would be torn in half if the women fought over them, so I gave them to the most nimble and good mothers from among the crowd.” She turned to the one-handed girl. “Is it not true?”

  “It was you who called the mob around us in the first place with your talk of a demon,” the one-handed girl replied. “You are the murderer.”

  “As am I,” Javan said, and drove a broken tent post through the guilty girl’s chest. As blood flowed out from where the post entered her flesh, Javan turned to the one-handed girl.

  “What three men did you lie with nine moons ago?” she asked.

  The girl spoke the names of three men. It is uncertain whether they were ones she truly had lain with, or ones who did not lie with her and therefore didn’t give her food, wine, and clothing. Men of no worth to her.

  In the chaos of the demon frenzy, most of the men had looted what they could and left with it, so that no one else could steal what they had stolen first. But Javan knew that when night fell again, they would be back. She waited, and not idly. She did not sheath her sword.

  “You!” she demanded. She had come upon three girls using cloths to rub dirt from their skin before the men returned that evening. One was also rubbing blood off her arm. It was the unusually beautiful girl with long hair except for a patch that was only a few moons long—the one who had said each of the boys must die. This was the girl to whom Javan was speaking.

  The girl looked up. She did not seem affected by the appearance of Javan’s mangled face and angry eyes—one wide open with the sight in it and one swollen to the size of a woman’s fist.

  “Yes?” the girl said.

  “I’ve come to kill you.”

  “Good.”

  Javan said, “Because you meant to—”

  “I do not care why.”

  “Then I will kill you in such a manner that you do.”

  Javan threatened to cut off the other girls’ ears if they didn’t run away. They could not afford to be badly disfigured, so they rushed from harm’s way and left their friend in Javan’s hands.

  Javan knocked the beautiful girl to the ground and fell on top of her so she couldn’t get up. But the girl did not even try. As Javan held the sharpness of her sword to the girl’s cheek, she couldn’t help looking into the girl’s kohl-ringed eyes. Insolent, exquisite eyes. Because the girl did not struggle, Javan did not have to fight with her, which gave her time to continue staring. The girl was too lovely for a seller of women to kill.

  “You do not care if you die, so you should not care too much about having to lie drunk on your back while I collect the money,” she told the girl.

  Without waiting for a reply, she moved on.

  The men were of some value to Javan, though less than her women and girls, because the men mostly passed through and sometimes never came back. But that night, when the men returned, Javan asked around, and she did so with her sword. A few of the boys in her service asked around too, and they were not as self-possessed as she was. If we were to add i
n the people who died while Javan’s boys looked for the three men Javan would kill, the death toll would be twice as high. And so this is what the townspeople did when they talked about how many men Javan killed. I heard one girl tell another, “Javan left Noah’s tent and did not rest until her work was done, except to run the blades of her long sword and small scythe along a whetstone until they were so sharp, people bled from just the sight of them.”

  Knowing what I know now, of water hungry for sinners, I would rather say the blood on Javan’s hands that day was piled only five lives high and not ten.

  One of Javan’s boys told her that the first of the three men she sought was in a flesh tent, and asked if he should kill him.

  “No, leave him for me.”

  “He is as large as a donkey,” the boy said. “He will not easily be killed.”

  “The bigger he is, the more breath he needs.”

  Javan, the boy, and two other boys hurried to the tent. The man was not the only one inside. Laughter, talk, and moaning came from all corners. “Show me where he is,” Javan ordered the first boy.

  He walked around to the back of the tent, and Javan followed. They soon heard the snoring of a man on his back.

  The boys held the tent up as Javan went around to pull the stakes up and hack at the wooden poles that were all that was left to support it. The laughter inside stopped, along with the sounds of pleasure and exertion.

  “Now,” Javan said, and they brought the tent down over the man, who had stopped snoring and was trying to roll away. Javan used a club on the man’s legs and torso.

  “Whath duth you want?” the man cried through the goatskin pressing down on him. The other people had stumbled from the tent and were rushing away.

  “Only your life,” Javan said.

  “I have things muth more valuable than thath,” the man said. “I haf the bones of a great cat and a collection of human skullths.”

  “So do I,” Javan said.

  “You haf not seen my face,” the man said. “Ith dishonorable to kill a man without first seeing hith face.”